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Internet and Gender in Kazakhstan offers an empirically rich and theoretically compelling analysis of how the Internet is influencing societal attitudes towards women’s roles and agency in Kazakhstan. Equipped with intimate perspectives from the wider public in five different regions of Kazakhstan, the book conceptualises, theorises, and analyses the relationship between the Internet and gender-related attitudes in Kazakhstan through a decolonial feminist lens. The author argues that digital communication technologies’ effect on societal attitudes towards gender roles and norms in Kazakhstan is conditional on Internet and social media penetration rates, state-led digital censorship, and the ways in which local activists and conservative bloggers use their online presence. The book will be of interest to policy makers and researchers in the field of media studies, gender studies – in particular women’s rights, LGBTQ+, feminist activism, and gender-based violence – and Central Asian studies.
"Internet and Gender in Kazakhstan offers an empirically rich and theoretically compelling analysis of how the Internet is influencing societal attitudes towards women's roles and agency in Kazakhstan. Equipped with intimate perspectives from the wider public in five different regions of Kazakhstan, the book conceptualises, theorises and analyses the relationship between the Internet and gender-related attitudes in Kazakhstan through a decolonial feminist lens. The author argues that digital communication technologies' effect on societal attitudes towards gender roles and norms in Kazakhstan is conditional on Internet and social media penetration rates, state-led digital censorship, and the ...
This open access book explores some of the struggles and challenges that researchers and practitioners face when conducting research in the Central Asian research setting. Written for scholars still in the planning stages of their research, it addresses key questions, including: How shall we problematize and reconceptualize the concept of positionality through lenses of local voices from the region? How does practitioners’ and scholars’ positionality contribute to their experiences of inclusion, exclusion, and access to the field? How do scholars navigate issues of personal safety and mental well-being in the more closely monitored societies of Central Asia? The book includes contributors from both Central Asia and Western countries, paying particular attention to the ways researchers’ subjectivity shape how they are received in the region, which, in turn, influences how they write about and disseminate their research. In featuring an even greater variety of voices, this book fills an important gap in the literature on field research and knowledge production in and on Central Asia.
Written for early-career scholars still in the planning stages of their research, this book explores some of the challenges researchers face when conducting fieldwork in the former Soviet region. It addresses key questions, including: What difficulties do scholars, especially females, encounter when researching in the region? How does an early-career scholars’ positionality – especially their nationality, ethnicity, and sexuality – contribute to their experiences of inclusion, exclusion, and access while conducting fieldwork? How do early-career scholars navigate issues of personal safety in the field? How do junior academics successfully conduct high-risk research? The book includes contributors from both the region and Western countries, paying particular attention to the ways researchers’ subjectivities shape how they are received in the region, which, in turn, influence how they write about and disseminate their research. The book also explores ways to continue research away from the field through the use of digital methods when physical access is not possible.
This book presents a comprehensive overview of current developments in Belarus. It explores how there has been an upswelling of popular support for the idea that Belarus must change. It highlights how the old regime, aiming to retain the Soviet legacy, reluctant to reform, presiding over worsening economic conditions and refusing to take measures to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic, has been confronted by increasing bottom-up social mobilisation which demands a transformation of state-society relations and a new sense of Belarusian peoplehood. The book outlines how the current situation has developed, considers how the present demands for change are deep seated and long brewing trends, and reveals much detail about many aspects of the growing societal mobilisation. Overall, the book demonstrates that, although the old regime remains in power, Belarusian society has changed fundamentally, thereby bringing great hope that change will eventually come about.
From limited interactions in the early 1990s, the EU and Central Asia now consider each other to be increasingly important. This book includes 12 chapters written by seasoned and policy-engaged researchers from across Eurasia and the wider world that analyse multiple levels of mutual interactions, understandings and misunderstandings across a range of policy areas. It shows why and in what ways exactly the EU and Central Asia matter to each other and why policymakers and researchers should pay more attention to their interactions. Central Asia falls under the broader external relations and security agenda of the EU, and over years it provided a testing ground for many EU policies, including ...
Launched in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is China's signature trillion-dollar global policy. Based on infrastructure development assistance and financing, the BRI quickly set in motion a possible restructuring of the global economy and indeed the world order. In Seeing China's Belt and Road, Edward Schatz and Rachel Silvey assemble leading field researchers to consider the BRI from different "downstream" contexts, ranging from Central and Southeast Asia to Europe and Africa. By uncovering perspectives on the BRI from Chinese authorities, local businesses, state bureaucrats, expatriated migrants, ordinary citizens, and environmental activists, Seeing China's Belt and Road shows the BRI's dynamic, multidimensional character as it manifests in specific sites. A timely analysis of the BRI, this book moves beyond polarized debates about China's rise and offers a grounded assessment of the dynamic complexity of changes to the world order.
This book presents the first large overview of late Soviet religiosity across several confessions and Soviet republics, from the 1960s to the 1980s. Based on a broad range of new sources on the daily life of religious communities, including material from regional archives and oral history, it shows that religion not only survived Soviet anti-religious repression, but also adapted to new conditions. Going beyond traditional views about a mere "returned of the repressed", the book shows how new forms of religiosity and religious socialisation emerged, as new generations born into atheist families turned to religion in search of new meaning, long before perestroika facilitated this process. In addition, the book examines anew religious activism and transnational networks between Soviet believers and Western organisations during the Cold War, explores the religious dimension of Soviet female activism, and shifts the focus away from the non-religious human rights movement and from religious institutions to ordinary believers.
Based on extensive original research, this book examines the extent to which media in Russia upholds the Russian government’s stance on sexuality. It considers the Russian government’s policies designed to uphold ‘traditional sexuality’, reveals the strategies of resistance used by Russian media outlets to create positive portrayals of non-heteronormative people and circumvent the restrictive 2013 legislation banning positive representations of ‘non-traditional sexual relations’, and highlights particular examples of subversive media practices. Overall, the book challenges the prevailing view that media in authoritarian regimes are completely compliant with their government’s position.
This book presents theoretical and empirical investigation of economic growth in Russia. The sharp decline in the national production that Russia endured in the 1990s, linked directly to the exhausting and ill-planned transition from the planned economy to the market economy, resulted in Russia plunging into the poverty trap. The goal of this book is to determine whether and how Russia manages to overcome the poverty trap and initiate and sustain economic growth. This book fills the gap between the volatile economic growth as an objective economic reality of Russia and the lack of scholarly literature on the issue. This study identifies the place and role of foreign aid in economic growth in...